Many persons try to maintain a healthy life style by exercising regularly and/or following a regular diet that includes plenty of fruits and vegetables. Unfortunately, in our fast-paced culture there are often times when the availability of fruits and vegetables is relatively limited. This can be particularly true on occasions where meals are purchased at quick service restaurants.
Although such establishments have shown an increasing willingness to accommodate health conscious patrons, that willingness often seems limited to the supplying of salads, or low sodium products. For example, a patron of a quick service hamburger restaurant would not typically expect to order a whole fruit or vegetable to go with a sandwich, rather than the traditional French fries. The offering of whole fruits and vegetables is atypical because quick service restaurants have become immensely successful at preparing and presenting certain food items in a ready-to-eat condition. However, these restaurants have not yet been able to accomplish the same feat with respect to whole fruits or vegetables, such as apples or oranges.
A small percentage of quick service restaurants have begun offering pre-packaged go bags of fruit slices in children's meals. However, these fruit slices are typically cut and sealed in the bags days before consumption by the patron, at an off-site location, and then shipped to the quick service restaurant. This requires the use of an off-site food distribution center to prepare and package these fruit slices, and complex machinery to do the off-site preparing and packaging. Thereafter, the prepared fruit slices must be shipped in refrigerated trucks and then kept in storage coolers at the quick service restaurant, to stay preserved at all times leading up to sale and consumption. This requires additional storage space, refrigeration, and shipping, all of which increase the cost and decrease the convenience of serving consumable pieces of fruit to a patron.
In addition, with this off-site approach the fruit slices must be packaged with a significant amount of preservative to maintain their edible state during storage. The need to use a preservative adds to the overall cost. Moreover, depending on the quantity and condition of the preservative, the resulting fruit slices may not be particularly appealing to the consumer, as a healthy option.
A different approach may involve the quick service restaurants supplying whole fruits and/or vegetables on demand, by hand-cutting them at the point of sale. However, this approach would take more time, and would likely be too slow for the typical speeds associated with quick service restaurants. Also, the need to cut the fruit and/or vegetable by hand would introduce several other potential problems, in addition to excessive time. First, the quick service restaurant would need to provide and have ready at all times a suitable sharp knife for making the cuts. The sharp knife presents a potential hazard to the employees of the quick service restaurants.
Also, the person using the knife would need to wash his or her hands prior to cutting, to ensure cleanliness. Even then, the fruit pieces delivered to the customer would have been handled directly by the hands of the worker at the quick service restaurant, before delivery to the consumer. Some patrons may find such handling of the fruit pieces to be unappetizing.
Still further, depending on the person using the knife, the fruit pieces may be inconsistent in size and shape. Patrons of quick service restaurants have become accustomed to consistency. But achieving such consistency with cut pieces of fruit would be difficult. And this consideration becomes more acute with an increase in the number of types of fruit.
There is a need to increase the availability of fresh fruit at quick service restaurants.